Current Analysis Analyst, Charlotte Dunlap talks with Parna Sarkar-Basu, vice president of marketing communications for Verivo Software about the enterprise mobility market from the developer’s perspective.

Sarkar-Basu: Why has the enterprise mobility market become so important today?

Dunlap: Developers are under a lot of pressure these days to create mobile apps for their companies because they are looking to generate new revenue streams and they are looking for new business opportunities. They are not finding these tools in their traditional application platforms, so they are naturally looking to vendors who have extensive expertise in these areas. These are mobile enterprise application platform providers—otherwise known as MEAP or MADP vendors. These vendors are coming to the aid of these developers with platforms for applications to support B2B [business-to-business], B2C [business-to-consumer], and B2E [business-to-employee] through middleware technology that provides the integration between back-end systems and mobile devices.

Sarkar-Basu: What are developers looking for in a mobile platform?

Dunlap: It’s most important for developers to gain access to platforms that don’t require extensive programming knowledge. These platforms are aimed at Web developers who are moving into the mobile market, as well as enterprise developers that are familiar with a particular proprietary platform. And, not only do they need help with the development of the applications, but they need help with the ongoing management. So, these platforms need to be able to provide ongoing management. Just by the nature of mobile applications’ real time and interactive status, these applications are constantly in need of updates and changes. The other thing these platforms need to include is really advanced integration technology. So, that comes through in the connectors between the workflow applications and back-end systems. Also, these platforms just need to be mature; they need to be best-of-breed; they need to have gone through years of regular cycle updates to show that they really do work in the real world in real world use cases. And the last thing that developers are looking for in platforms is that they be write once, run on any device. So it’s really important that the platform provider adheres to standards like HTML5 and JavaScript because developers need the option of developing in native, hybrid, and HTML.

Sarkar-Basu:So Charlotte, tell me a little bit about what companies should be looking for while selecting a platform provider?

Dunlap: Companies should look for a vendor that provides training and life cycle support for mobile applications. They should look for companies that have a global presence—especially for larger enterprises. And lastly, enterprises should look for vendors that have very straight forward pricing structure, such as CPU-based [processor-based] pricing.

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